Category Archives: Movie reviews

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: Alan at Night (2025)

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Directed and written by Jesse Swenson, Alan at Night is about what happens when Jay (Joseph Basquill) needs a new roommate after his YouTube partner leaves town. It’s only for a month, as his girlfriend Sam (Hadley Durkee) plans on moving in. That brings Alan (Chris Ash) into their lives. He’s quiet; he can’t hold his drink. When he passes out in his room, he appears to be sleepwalking, stealing shoes and eating all the mayo.

Additionally, he becomes possessed and has all-white eyes.

The truth is, I really couldn’t blame Alan for how he felt after getting pranked all the time. As always, I dislike people not asking for consent and found footage, so when Alan got his revenge, I was on his side.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2025 Red Eye #7: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

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All hail David Dastmalchian! He picked the last Red Eye of the Chattanooga Film Festival, and man, he did it right! Coffin Joe! Also: How amazing is it that this movie was made in 1964? It had to scare the hell out of people.

How badass is Zé do Caixão, or as we know him, Coffin Joe?

Can you imagine the audacity to not just create this character but to become him in the midst of a country where more than 60% of the population is Catholic?

Can you even comprehend how upset people were when José Mojica Marins became the long-fingernail-wearing amoral undertaker driven to continue his bloodline by having a son with the perfect woman while murdering and ruining everyone in his wake? How did they deal with a boogeyman who filled their head with double-talk and Nietzschean statements?

As Coffin Joe would yell, “I challenge your power! I deny your existence! Nothing exists, but life.”

The first appearance of Coffin Joe is in this movie, a film in which the evil undertaker searches for his perfect woman who will bear him the child that will make him immoral. After all, his wife is infertile, so he decides to murder her with a spider. And not just on any day. On a Catholic Holy Day. And then he decides to break another Commandment, coveting Terezinha, the fiancée of his friend Antonio.

Joe and Antonio visit a gypsy who foretells that a tragedy will keep Antonio and Terezinha from being married. This causes Joe to scream at the woman about how the supernatural is a lie, then he makes her warning come true by strangling his friend before drowning him. The very next day, he starts to court Terezinha by giving her a canary. When she resists his advances, he beats her and then assaults her. She curses him and reveals that she will kill herself — one of the gravest sins in the Catholic Church — and come back to pull him into Hell. He laughs, but the next day, she has hung herself.

The police just can’t seem to figure out why all these deaths are happening in this small village, but Dr. Rodolfo does. Coffin Joe responds by tearing out his eyes with his long fingernails and setting him on fire. Problem solved. He remains unpunished and even starts to fall for another woman, Marta. On their date, he sees the gypsy who warns him that he will be punished. That night, as he walks home, the cemetery calls him, the place where all of his victims are burning. He opens the grave of Antonio and Terezinha, and they begin to open their eyes as their mouths are filled with worms and insects. Coffin Joe starts to scream, as he is trapped between life and death, finally paying for his crimes as the church bells ring at midnight.

This is just the start of how strange these movies would become. If you liked the last ten minutes of this, just get ready. It gets really good from here.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: House of Ashes (2024)

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Meat Friend, a short that director and co-writer (with Steve Johanson) Izzy Lee made, is one of the best short films I’ve seen, so I was excited about this feature.

Mia (Fayna Sanchez) has lost her husband and her baby, which has led to her being jailed in her home, as she lives in a state where miscarriage is murder. Under house arrest, she moves in with her new boyfriend, Marc (Vincent Stalba), and tries to get through things with her sanity intact.

But ah, that Bava lighting clues us in that this is in no way paradise. And Marc isn’t a dream partner, either.

So what happened with her husband Adam (Mason Conrad), who was found in their animal clinic with a syringe in his neck, a death that caused her to lose the baby and be arrested for his murder, until it was learned that Adam had killed himself? Marc soon loses it over her memories of Adam, demanding she destroy everything with a memory of him attached and then drugging her despite her being on probation. To make things worse, her probation officer (Lee Boxleitner) continually calls her a murderer, and social media personality Lexi ShokToks (Laura Dromerick) is stalking her, hoping to push her into creating viral content.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where this film no longer feels entirely horror. Yes, the ghosts are from the fantastic, but the lack of body autonomy for women isn’t just speculative fiction. This adds a darkness to this film that haunts every frame.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: In the Mouth (2025)

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I know that you don’t have to love every protagonist in every film, but I somehow found myself watching multiple films at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where each lead made me want to rage-quit the movie. That’s not fair to the filmmaker or the film, so I stuck it out each time. This would be one of those times.

Merl (Colin Burgess) never leaves his house. His home is also enormous and challenging to comprehend. So yes, you can see why he needs to bring on a roommate — the second CFF movie where someone got a roommate and it ruined their life — to make his rent.

That new friend is Larry (Paul Rothery), who has just escaped from jail and is constantly being watched by his criminal associates.

Director and writer Cory Santilli has agoraphobia, and this has many moments that prove this, as Merl can’t leave this place even when he’s months behind on paying the landlady. One reason he never leaves? There’s a giant version of his head sticking out of the front yard.

It’s a quirky film that just didn’t resonate with me, but you may find something to love here. Most of the other reviews I’ve checked online have been overwhelmingly positive, so I think I need to give this another watch.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: Inertia: Re-Making The Crow (2001)/James O’Barr’s The Crow (1998)

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Inertia: Re-Making The Crow (2001): Directed by David Ullman along with Matt Jackson, who in their teen years decided to take an obsession over the film The Crow and recreate it with a version closer to James O’Barr’s original graphic novel. Shot on video and in black and white, this took four years and drove Ullman’s family insane.

The original pitch for this doc was wide in its scope: “I’d like Inertia to be both an examination of how we created our movie and an exploration of the comic from which it came. Using behind-the-scenes footage, photographs, and interviews, the documentary will illustrate the process by which two 14-year-olds successfully adapted a comic of such breadth, texture, and intensity; the challenges their limited resources presented; and the creativity used to overcome them, ultimately showing how passion can overcome adversity.

Additionally, an underlying study of O’Barr’s piece and a character study of the young filmmaker for whom this project became an obsession should be included. The picture should play like Hearts of Darkness meets Looking For Richard.”

The original documentary was attacked for copyright reasons, but over the years, it has played several film festivals and is more than just about the comic book or the movie. It’s about how two young men from Ohio matured as artists and made something together that would inform the rest of their lives.

You can get this movie on VHS from Lunchmeat VHS.

James O’Barr’s The Crow (1998): Created by David Ullman and Matt Jackson over four years, throughout their high school years, this is what SOV is all about: obsessive devotion. When their friends didn’t show up, when their family didn’t understand, they kept making this movie.

On Ullman’s site, he has this quote: “There’s this aura to the book. When you look at it, you feel something. There is blood on the page, and you can sense that. It’s very affecting. I think they captured that beautifully in the Miramax film, and it was our intention at first to make a hybrid of the existing movie and the comic book. But the more serious we became about the project in general, the more we wanted to really delve into the book, explore its themes and characters, create something more of our own.”

Both star in the film, with Ullman as Eric Draven and Jackson as Top Dollar. The sets were in the family bedroom. Over four years, they learned how to take a comic book, transform it into a script and storyboard, and then create art from it.

I get it. I saw The Crow so many times in the theater, I listened to the soundtrack over and over, and there are even Halloween party photos somewhere of me as a chubby Crow, carrying my guitar and a gun. 1994 was a big time for this movie. Here’s to two filmmakers who pushed for this and made it a reality on a budget that’s so much less than Hollywood would ever attempt.

You can watch this on YouTube thanks to Lunchmeat VHS.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, and updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: CFF Salutes Your Shorts

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It’s the first block of shorts, so with no further ado — let’s get into it!

Cat and Fish (2025): In this animated short by director and writer Nilram Ranjbar, a fish goes to a much better, larger body of water, all thanks to the sun and an unexpected friend: a cat. What charming animation in this, creating a near 3D version of string to match the colors and tones.

Damned (2025): Directed by Lukas Anderson, who co-wrote this short with Elio Andres, Jesse (Cole Kelley) breaks his house arrest — with just two weeks left on his sentence — as his parole officer tries to track him down with his ankle monitor. The police aren’t the only ones looking for him, as a demon (C.P. Walker) wants back the soul of the father. Or maybe it’s all about something more. This is a nice short, one that maybe needs the last line to tie it all up nice with a bow, but that’s fine. It’s working with a really truncated time in an attempt to share a much larger story. It feels like a full-length film could come from this.

Don’t Look (2025): Directed and written by John Wyatt, this starts with a young boy named Eli waking up to find monsters under his bed. Little does he know that it wasn’t his imagination. Maybe he shouldn’t go back to sleep. Well, not like he’s getting a chance — spoiler warning — as he definitely isn’t alone. A really quick film and one where I’d love to have seen perhaps something extra added, a twist or something that makes this story stand out.

Sin Eater (2025): Director and writer Corey Simpson tells the story of Minerva, who is trying to clean out the home of her dead grandmother when a stranger shows up to tell her that she must take on the burden her grandmother owned, the Sin Eater. Much like “The Sins of the Fathers” episode of Night Gallery, this shows how the pains of sin must be passed on to a new generation. What helps make this even better are the strobing Bava-style lighting, music that shoots for an Italian film feel at times and great sound design. It feels dark and gauzy, like those tapes you used to bootleg from the video store and then wondered, “What am I watching?” Trust me. That’s a good thing.

Lola (2025): Tessie’s grandmother, Lola, has been diagnosed with dementia. Tessie can’t handle it so she’s created a machine that tries to save the memories before an AI named Mena destroys it. Directed by Grace Hanna, who wrote it with Derek Manansala and Duke Yang, this has one memory — a night of karaoke singing — being recreated so that one perfect memory can be saved. Yet Tessie doesn’t realize that in her struggle to keep the past, she’s forgetting the time she has in the here and now. My father had dementia and days were struggles, as he forgot who he was and even who I was at times. No machine could keep him either, no matter how hard you’d try. Sometimes, you think you’d get through and then you’d realize he hadn’t been paying attention. It’s so frightening to lose someone before they’re gone and this movie does a great job of capturing that feeling. All we can do is enjoy the short window that we have together, no matter how conscious we may be of it. Memory is, as they say, fleeting.

The Bohannons – Night Construction (2025): A stop motion animation from Chattanooga’s The Skeleton Key Workshop, this shows the sun setting for the day and the moon and the night sky being put together. Directed and written by Matt Eslinger, you have to admire the guts of this band to have a bio that says this: “The Bohannons are one of Chattanooga’s finest exports, who make heavy rock ’n’ roll that’s equal parts Motörhead and Neil Young, with lead guitar chops that rival both.” I can report that this video and song kick ass.

Til Death Do Us Part (2025): Directed by Bronwyn Blanks-Blundell and Alexander Protich, this finds Doctor Frigg in her lab, trying to bring her one true love back to life. Slamming her fist on the desk, a tape recorder is activated, bringing something else back to life: her voice from the past, a transmission that may give her the information that she needs to move on. This is a nice short, one that uses its animation, music and sound design well.

Meeet (2025): Six eccentric characters are starving in a bomb shelter. When one of them seemingly dies — maybe — the rest decides to eat her corpse. But just a little bit, right? Yet what happens next, well, it proves that writers — while being liars — often write their own justice. Directed by Laama Almadani and written by Yemi Eniolorunda, this makes one wonder about just how you would go through eating someone. We’ve all debated it, but the actual butchering and cooking seems like too much. And what wine do you serve with it? And even worse, if someone is so stoned that you can just into them and serve their body, which wakes them because it smells so good that they eat it themselves, could you finish your meal? What a great short, put together so simply. Loved it!

CHECK PLEASE (2024): I am a veteran of the wars of fighting for the check. The director, Shane Chung, is too. He said, “As a kid, I witnessed firsthand the quickness with which friends can turn on each other whenever my parents took me to dinner with their pals. It was all smiles until it came time to pay for the bill – then the fangs came out. “I got it!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s my treat!” “You can get me next time!” It got so serious for no reason. Arguing, subterfuge… it was killing with kindness taken to another level. I wondered how far someone could take fighting to pay for the bill. Inspired by my love of goofy slapstick action comedies like Drunken Master and Everything Everywhere All At Once, I thought: what if they literally fought each other? I challenged myself to write a ten-minute long action scene where two Korean-Americans fought each other with chopsticks, grill coverings, and credit cards… and CHECK PLEASE was born.”

Starring Richard Yan and Sukwon Jeong, this is a simple story but is so perfect. It gets across what it means to be a man — paying the bill — as well as the director’s attempts at getting across the feeling of assimilating to a new culture. It’s also filled with great action. I laughed really hard throughout and found joy here.

Baking and Entering (2025): Directed and written by Lance Harbour, Cole Keisling, Andrew Lacy, Zach Legaux and Brooklynne Scivally, this has Hugh, a pie baker in a food truck, dealing with a grizzly bear. Perhaps he should be happy to have a customer. This is a cute animated short that has a sweet ending and gives the viewer a nice moral, all in a short running time. I love the bear — his face when the metal window keeps closing is so endearing.

Feed (2025): Directed and written by Kara McLeland, this has Rachel and Nick having a party guest over, almost lamenting that over the past year how their lives have changed because of the Harbor Initiative. Gone are the days of concerts and going out, instead they stay home — because a space alien baby is part of their lives. That child never sleeps on certain nights of the full moon and must feed differently on Thursday and no one can keep up on the message boards, but now they’re eating fingers and destroying relationships. Maybe this dinner party isn’t just for our married couple. I love this, a tension-packed short that rightly takes it time to drop the hammer on you.

We Need to Talk About Balloons (2025): Dani’s mom is a social media influencer using her daughter for her mom brand, but Dani would rather be Dani the Destroyer, a magician. But why would a magician be called a destroyer? Directed by Jennifer Bonior and co-written with Dycee Wildman, this shows that you shouldn’t try and run a child’s life, much less tell her that she has to move on from doing balloon popping magic, unless you want to be a stain on the wall of a glittery balloon shop.

The Lily and the Scorpion (2025): Outlaws The Lily and The Scorpion are on the run after a bank job gone wrong. These partners are losing trust in one another and it’s like everything is falling to pieces. Directed and written by Charlie Netto, this has two female outlaws in the west, which is a story not often told. But what happens when one of them wants to go straight and end the outlaw life? This could so easily be a full-length movie with the storytelling in it. I loved this — an exploration of freedom, for a little while, until one needs to be safe.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Nine Lives (2016)

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June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

I saw this at the drive-in, a second feature with something else that I can’t remember, but you don’t forget a movie in which a not far from being cancelled Kevin Spacey plays Tom Brand, a workaholic tycoon who becomes a cat.

Yes, he’s also married to Jennifer Garner, so all is well in his world, even if he rarely sees her. He’s too busy building the biggest builder ever or something. He gets his daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman) a cat to make up for almost forgetting her birthday, buying it from the strange pet store of Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken). As he learns another building will be taller than his, he is blown off the roof and isn’t saved by his assistant Ian (Mark Consuelos). Tom goes to the hospital, near death, but his mind is inside Mr. Fuzzypants.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who was the cinematographer of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Misery, but also directed the Men In Black movies and Get Shorty, not to mention Wild Wild West. Somehow, this was the last movie he would direct. Somehow, this took five writers: Gwyn Lurie, Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Daniel Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin.

But at least Lil Bub was in it.

JUNESPLOITATION: Crime Busters (1977)

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June 26: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Eurosploitation!

I due superpiedi quasi piatti (The Two Almost Flat Superfeet) puts Terence Hill and Bud Spencer together again (it is the tenth of seventeen movies they would be in together) and sends them to Miami.

In this film, they’re Matt Kirby and Wilbur Walsh, longshoremen who decide to rob a grocery store and, in the process, end up being cops. Look, this is even years before Police Academy, and it has a lot of the same notions.

Somehow, they got David Huddleston to be in this as Captain McBride, who is in charge of the boys. Soon, they all learn that the same criminals who controlled the docks where they worked are behind a lot more.

Also known as Trinity: In Trouble Again, Two Supercops and Crime Busters, this is not related to Miami Supercops, another Hill and Spencer movie. Hill and Spencer made five movies in Miami that are in my favorite genre: Italians making their movies partially in America.

There’s even more meta in here, as a hot dog cart plays the theme song of their movie,  Even Angels Eat Beans. During a scene where Matt is trying to get Wilbur to be kinder, he remarks, “He who finds a friend finds a treasure.” That would be a future Hill and Spencer title.

If you’ve seen any of those, you know what this movie is all about. Hill is the good-looking nice one, and Spencer is the giant grump. Somehow, they may not start as friends, but they get that way, which leads to slap fights with bad guys and frequent bean eating. However, a formula is called that because it works, and these movies make me happy as I can be—just joyous, singing along to the music and happy that I live in a world where they were filmed.

This was directed and written by E.B. Clutcher, who also made nearly every union of these two, directed The Unholy Four and shot movies like Django, Erik the Viking and Nightmare Castle. Yes, that’s the Americanized name of Enzo Barboni, the director of Trinity.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this comedy, Hill’s character becomes involved with an Asian family and works to help them as the criminals target them. Their daughter? Laura Gemser. Throw in some Oliver Onions soundtrack, and there’s no way I could love this more.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

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Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd, to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) for disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies, where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also excessively melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Blood Rage (1987)

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Identical blonde twins Todd and Terry are at the drive-in with their mother, who is making out with her boyfriend in the front seat. Seeing so many people having sex — including his mom — from the back seat flips out Terry, who starts killing people with a hatchet. He smears the blood all over his brother, because that’s how forensics worked in the 1980s, and he escapes scot free. That’s how Blood Rage — one of the few films to be set on Thanksgiving — begins.

Ten years later, Terry (Mark Soper in a dual role) lives with his mother (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star Louise Lasser). On the night of Thanksgiving, Mom reveals that she’s about to marry Brad. We also learn that Todd has escaped from the mental hospital. Terry doubles down to keep his brother locked up by killing Brad by chopping off his right hand — which still clutches a can of Old Style — before splitting his head in half with a machete.

Todd’s doctor and her assistant are looking for him, but run into Terry, who stabs and dismembers both of them before hooking up with new neighbor Andrea who is planning a house party.

Meanwhile, Mom is freaking out learning that Todd is getting closer, but Terry is the one we should be worried about. He’s on a real tear, wiping out all sorts of people, like a tennis-playing couple. All manner of mistaken identity occurs, ending with a swimming pool battle between the twin brothers, and Mom kills Terry when she really wanted to kill Todd. And oh yeah — her incestual relationship with her son is revealed as the reason for his insanity. She blows her brains out and Todd just stands there as the police close in.

This movie is also Nightmare at Shadow Woods, with none of the gore left. You should avoid that one as the real reason to enjoy this — I mean, unless you enjoy 1980s films about incest — is the rampant gore.

Come for Ted Raimi, condom salesman. Stay for hatchets to the face and a doctor’s assistant sliced in half, as well as rampant synth music from Richard Einhorn, who also scored Shock Waves and Don’t Go in the House. It was directed by John Grissmer, who was also behind 1973’s The Bride (Last House on Massacre Street).

You can get the art on this post at Tim Monsters!